Currently, there are several social networking sites that allow users to post profiles and content to an online forum, e.g., art work, writing, clippings, photos, etc. However, most of these websites are available for the general public to join, making it difficult to locate relevant user profiles and information, screen service providers and others from the network, and control quality of the postings. Some sites have sought to alleviate the screening and location issues by establishing groups within the social networking site and restricting access for complaints about users that contact people outside their group without prior contact. These methods generally fail in an academic context, however, because a general user may join a group to search for researchers to pose a question to, e.g., an academic researching a new cancer drug, making the site burdensome to researchers in the field. Some sites also attempt to restrict profile searching to people who have similar educational backgrounds, professional backgrounds etc., but such searches may not locate academics in similar research fields from different institutions.
Conventional social networking sites also have issues when it comes to evaluating the quality of profiles and user content. Some sites attempt to alleviate the quality issue by allowing site users to provide positive or negative feedback regarding a particular user, e.g., to “like”, to up vote, or to post comments related to the content or user. Unfortunately, this method of user evaluation has serious drawbacks for academic content. For example, there is no way to measure the quality of the user feedback for a particular user, so if content is highly technical or has a limited audience, the feedback may not be an accurate indicator of content quality, or worse, it may be offensive.
A need exists for a method and system that solves the issues identified above.